Emily Gale

We loved Gus Gordon’s Herman and Rosie and this month he’s teamed up with Jill Esbaum for a new picture book: I Am Cow, Hear Me Moo! Esbaum uses lively rhyme to tell a ‘power of positive thinking’ yarn about…

It was my privilege to attend this year’s Children’s Book Council conference in Canberra last weekend. The theme for the conference was ‘Discovering National Treasures’ and one of my personal highlights was ‘A Bird In The Hand’, an exhibition at…

There are a few different ways one can respond to the Budget, and there’s also a children’s book to suit them all. 1. Celebrate the good stuff. Last year My Happy Life by Rose Lagercrantz and Eva Eriksson - an…

If you’re a mother in a children’s book it likely means one or both of the following: (a.) you’re horribly dysfunctional, or (b.) you’re dead. So with Mother’s Day approaching (on Sunday 11 May), here are some mothers who not…

Let’s all take a minute to consider what it would feel like for our 8th-grade diaries to land us a book deal. Correction: most of us don’t need an entire minute to appreciate the full horror of that. However, for…

There are now a few good sibling-issues picture books that tell it like it is, or can be when a new baby is brought home (The Swap, Bye-Bye Baby Brother, Stupid Baby) but none of them…

Children’s & YA Specialist Emily Gale muses on the difficulties and debates surrounding gender-specific books, and asks just who is the villain here? British newspaper, The Independent, recently published a fiery article decrying children books that are gender-specific in…

For those of you who live and breathe books and consider many of them to be close personal friends, my first pick for February is going to make your hearts sing: A Book is a Book by Jenny Bornholdt (and…

Parents start out with certain ideals: I will never use bribes, I will never raise my voice, I will never use the television as a babysitter… So, just for fun, here’s a list of gorgeous children’s books for the new…

There’s a general perception that young boys today don’t enjoy reading as much as girls; that they find it more difficult to learn and are therefore reluctant to do it for fun. This turned out to be true in my…

I’ve written elsewhere about my favourite children’s and young adult books of 2013, a task that can feel as controversial as picking a favourite child because of the wide variety of books in our department (i.e. not impossible but liable…

In part four of our totally-and-completely-fail-proof-Christmas-shopping-guides-for-2013, our children’s & YA book specialist Emily Gale compiles some excellent gift ideas for kids and teens. Creative Gifts Animation Studio Stop-motion movies are an ideal way of putting those iPods/Pads/cameras etc to good…